Looks Like YouTube Infringes Microsoft’s Patent

Earlier today there was news that Android phones now violate Apple’s iPhone patent. The USTPO granted Apple a patent on the “slide to unlock” feature in iOS. Unlike Windows Phone, Android phones have the same slide to unlock feature. In a patent that I came across, it looks like YouTube and pretty much all video streaming websites now in some way violate Microsoft’s intellectual property. The patent application titled Presenting video content within a web page filed back in 2006, Microsoft engineers have talked about a video embedded on a webpage and, well, displaying the video.

Let’s consider the number of websites that now violate the patentâ€”YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu and gazillion other video streaming websites. Not long back, I reported about Microsoft being granted a patent on adaptive video streaming. The two patents combined together give Microsoft intellectual property rights over what is effectively all that’s in online video streaming. Here are two images from patent application:

This sets up some pretty interesting dynamics as far as Microsoft and Google are. Microsoft has licensing deals with most major Android manufacturers and now YouTube infringing Microsoft’s patent.